Online meeting systems enable geographically separated users to collaborate on a task in real-time. At a scheduled meeting time, each user visits a specific Internet Protocol (IP) address through their Web browsers running on their computer systems. The IP address corresponds to that of a server system hosting the meeting system. Upon visiting the Web site of the meeting system, the users select and join a meeting. During the online meeting, the users can exchange messages, share documents, screen displays and applications, and show each other presentations, images, and drawings.
Often, businesses have a variety of special requirements before, during, and after scheduling, conducting, and concluding their meetings. For example, some businesses require a high degree of security, and thus need to verify the list of participants of the meeting before the meeting can begin. Other businesses, such as call centers, desire to have the ability to bill users for the time spent in the meeting. For businesses to implement their special requirements requires integration of third-party software with the online meeting system. One technique to achieve this integration, as illustrated in FIG. 1, is for the meeting system 10 to provide an application program interface 14 (API) that allows third-party systems 18 to perform certain functions, such as create, read, update, and delete meetings in the online meetings system 10.
For businesses to impose their special requirements on these meetings, however, many of which require certain actions to occur before the meeting can begin, the third-party program developers had to interpose its software between the user and the online meeting system. The third-party software then impersonated the online meeting system to intercept the requests of the user and perform those actions necessary to satisfy these special requirements before, during, and after the meetings occurred. Calls to the methods (also referred to herein as procedures) of the API of the online meeting system occurred under the control of the third-party software. This manner of integration, however, requires software developers of the third party to become intimately familiar with the online meeting system, so as to be able, for example, to work with the API of the online meeting system, create meetings, and handle exceptions when the meetings cannot be created.
Often the special requirements of third-party systems also require that the online meeting system makes procedure calls into proprietary APIs of the third-party software to integrate fully. As a result, full integration requires custom changes that result in several different versions of the online meeting system tailored for specific customers and business partners. Further, implementing such custom changes and special versions usually requires downtime of the online meeting system and risks introducing software flaws into the third-party system because of unfamiliarity with that system. Thus, there is a need for a system and method that can enable integration of third-party systems with an online meeting system without the aforementioned disadvantages of present systems.